8 Ways To Get More Visitors To Your Small Business Website

Getting visitors to your business website is what every business owner wants. Knowing how to market your business online is seen as a complicated. However, it is something that you can do yourself – if you know what to do.

This simple guide can help you start to get more visitors to your website, which means more traffic, more potential sales and success for your business.

1) Maintain A Blog

The first tool in getting more traffic to your small business website is to have a blog installed on your website.

Creating content that your potential customers will find useful and interesting will help drive traffic to your website.

The carefully chosen word of tip number one is ‘Maintain’. We have purposefully avoided the title ‘Create A blog’. That’s the easy part. Maintaining it, regularly producing great posts, and engaging people is the harder part.

Excellent articles get shared on social media and earn inbound links from other blogs, and websites. More links equals higher rankings which means more traffic.

Spend time writing your article, thinking of each and every word in your content. Once you have done this, spend just as long again considering your headline. Why?

An analogy we use when discussing this with clients is running a blog is like a Gym Membership.

We have all joined a gym and after 3 months we give up as we are not seeing any difference. We get downhearted, we are not seeing any improvement.

Yet if we stuck at it for 12 months then there would be a change.

Stick with it and results come. Nothing happens overnight but perseverance is the key.

2) Your Social Media Pages.

It’s amazing how many small businesses do not have social media pages.

There are many reasons we have heard for this, including;

I don’t know how to set them up.

What would I put on it?

None of our customers are on Facebook.

I just don’t have the time.

Each social media channel gives your business a new profile on that platform. It’s free advertising and as with Local Search SEO, is considered an authorisation of your businesses existence. This can help with your rankings.

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest are your essentials. Some will work better for you than others, but use all of them to ensure consistency.

Now you have a blog, and are creating content, you need somewhere to share it. Your social media channels are your first opportunity.

Use hashtags, great images and remember your headlines. All of this helps to drive new customers and visitors to your website.

Remember to add sharing buttons to your website. Anyone who reads your posts can then share your article with their friends, this increasing its visibility. You can use AddThis or the Monarch Plugin as tools to do this among others.

3) Google Keyword Planner

Every time I mention this to a small business owner I get a blank look.

Their first thought is ‘It’s sounding complicated now’. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Creating new content for your visitors is essential as the previous tips show. What you do not want to do is waste time creating content that no-one is actually searching for.

By using the Google Keyword Planner you can actually find out how many people are searching for a subject and write articles that answer their questions.

Remember, you are writing for people. This tool just lets you know how many are looking, what the competition is, and interestingly, other topics associated with your search.

Unsurprisingly, this will get you more visitors to your website.

4) Name Your Website Pages Correctly.

Another simple tip that we often see overlooked.

Website Optimisation.

If you are writing an article that explains some simple tips on how to get more visitors to your small business website, create a URL that says this.

This is called optimisation and helps search engines and readers know what your post is about.

Instead of naming it www.website.com/article46 call it www.website.com/get-more-visitors-to-your-small-business-website – Interestingly enough this helps search engines, and your readers to tell what this page is about.

If your website is on WordPress use a plugin called Yoast. There is a vast amount of information available online on how to use this to help with your titles, keywords and meta descriptions. The best thing about it is that it is free.

5) Mobile Friendly Website

Did you know 62% of businesses with a mobile friendly website saw an increase in sales?

Many of your website visitors will be doing so from their mobile phone or tablet.

If your site is mobile friendly they will stay, engage and browse your website.

In April 2015 Google stated that mobile friendliness is a ranking signal. If your website is not responsive or mobile friendly then it will be affected on mobile searches.

Put simply, if you’re not responsive, you aren’t going to show up in search results on mobile devices.

As much as 60% of web searches in 2015 are conducted from a mobile phone or tablet.

That’s a large part of your audience wiped out if you don’t comply.

6) Online Advertising

As with any business word of mouth only works to a certain degree.

Sometimes you have to advertise to reach new markets and customers.

Before you sigh and give up prepare to be surprised when it comes to the cost.

Most advertising on social media is actually inexpensive and you can set manageable budgets to ensure maximum exposure to suit your budget. Facebook and Twitter both offer affordable advertising for your business.

You can return to the Google Keyword Planner here, and you will notice that this tool also gives you an estimated CPC (cost per click) to advertise on Google.

This is an amount to display your advert on Google. You only pay when it is clicked, and in certain industries is a highly effective way of driving targeted traffic.

7) Offline Advertising

Hang on, aren’t we talking about driving traffic to your website?

Yes we are. A newspaper advertisement, trade magazine or back of a bus is another undervalued method of getting website visitors.

A small quarter page advert in an industry magazine can tease a potential customer to find out more about your business. An interview with the local paper can expose your business to a large audience that you would never have reached before.

8) Sponsored Content

When you read blogs or newspapers do you notice that there are boxes at the bottom or the side advertising related content?

This is promoted content.

Platforms such as Outbrain and Taboola help drive traffic to your website as they reach massive audiences you would often find hard to advertise on. For many business websites creating content is not the problem.

Getting it found is.

Promoting your content is a simple method of driving visitors while you build up your rankings and authority.

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Join the discussion 11 Comments

Thank you Jim for providing us simple, clear, direct and effective strategies. Got most of it but I learned a new too: Google Keyword Planner, Yes, I am one of this people said “huh” when I ready it. Thanks for educating us and sharing this wonderful insights.

Adding to your point about creating social media pages, I always counselled people with small business to set up a page for their business on the major social media networks even if they aren’t going to use it regularly. It is the nature of social media that if you don’t claim a page with your name, someone else could do it. Lots of good advise here. Thanks,.

Great advice. It’s funny how after you’ve been working online for a few years you begin to take these things for granted but there are so many people either just starting out or unaware of what it takes to build and online presence this basic information is really valuable.

For someone like me, who was technology challenged, this is a wonderful post.
I need information like this to help me promote my website, and hence my novel. It is vital information I need. Thank you for sharing this.

I’ve been looking at Outbrain recently. It keeps coming up as a sponsored post in my Facebook feed. I’d been wondering why I might benefit from using something like that, but your write-up about it makes sense. I started a Facebook Ad campaign for sign-ups on my website and that has been pretty effective.

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